Facilitated by scholar and writer Celeste-Marie Bernier, this group will read and discuss Frederick Douglass’s 1861 speech “Lecture on Pictures” in the context of the exhibition Isaac Julian: Lessons of the Hour. After reading the text and exploring the exhibition, we’ll be guided in a thoughtful conversation about the historical and contemporary relevance of Frederick Douglass’s words and images in relation to his revolutionary and radical philosophies of human rights, social justice, authorship, oratory, aesthetics, and artistic representation.
All his life, Douglass insisted that “I must speak and write just the word to be spoken and written by me.” He also fought a lifelong war against the “caricature of my face” in a white, racist, Western imaginary. Working together on all of “freedom’s battlegrounds," Douglass and his wife Anna Murray held to their united conviction that “pictures are a power” in the fight for equal human rights and the war on white supremacy. They also passed that belief on to their children and other descendants.
Dr. Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor and Personal Chair of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis. She is historian-consultant-researcher to Sir Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, and the Frederick Douglass Honor Society. She is the author, editor, and curator of over 85 books, essays, exhibitions, and educational guides, and an international advisor/writer/consultant on documentaries, films, TV series, monuments, historic plaques, and buildings. She has held numerous appointments, fellowships, and editorships, including at Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, and Oxford universities, King’s College London, University of California, Santa Barbara, the National Center for the Humanities, the Salzburg Seminar, and the Obama Institute. In 2018 she was awarded a citation by Lt. Governor Boyd Rutherford of Maryland “as an internationally respected scholar, author and world renowned historian.” She is the author and editor of a forthcoming series of nine books: Douglass Family Lives: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Biography and Collected Works (six volumes), Revolutionary Liberator: The Anna Murray Douglass Family Biography, Anna Murray Douglass: A Revolutionary Family Life in Documents, and Rosetta Douglass Sprague: A Revolutionary Family Life in Documents. The series will be available in fall 2025.
Register for the event on August 13, 2024, 6:00–8:00 pm. Light refreshments will be served.
Registration is required and is limited to 35 participants.
This session is part of MoMA’s Reading Group series. Our intention is to create space for people to gather to consider a range of perspectives and think critically through guided readings of key texts that can help illuminate new ways of looking at artwork on view in MoMA’s galleries. Our priority is to create a space that is comfortable enough for participants to take risks with their thinking and possibly find a sense of fellowship, community, and camaraderie with the facilitator and their fellow readers. No prior preparation or background is necessary to participate. We will read texts together during the session. This program is free, open to all, and takes place in the galleries and in the Crown Creativity Lab.
Accessibility
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.
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Major funding is provided by Volkswagen of America, the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art Endowment for Educational Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.